Hajin walked the road with both hands in his pockets while the morning sun worked at the back of his neck, keeping the gray line of the capital walls in front of him.
Juna walked three steps behind, which was where she had walked for two days, so he had stopped pretending the distance was accidental.
'It counts as progress,' he thought, checking on her without turning his head, 'she is not running anymore, which is more than I had at the start of the week.'
She still went tense whenever he moved too fast, still answered in pieces, though she was walking with him now instead of away from him.
The walls climbed higher the closer the road carried them, until the gate separated itself out of the smear.
'Is this even a good idea,' he thought, watching a cart train crawl toward that opening, 'because a city that size means guards and questions I would rather not answer.'
He had no idea what a man wearing Rings instead of Shards would look like to a city full of adventurers who had never seen one.
The system had fixed his manifestation path without supplying a cover story for why he came out different from everyone else alive.
'Sitting in the woods eating deer for the rest of my life is not a plan either,' he thought, rubbing his neck, 'I need information, coin and a door I can shut.'
The stream panel had been sitting at the corner of his vision since dawn, so he opened it, because ignoring it had stopped working somewhere around noon of the first day.
[ Stream ]
[ Status: Active ]
[ Viewers: 10 ]
[ Comments: 47 ]
The count had reached ten, which unlocked a donation line the system had been keeping shut.
[ ShadowMage44: ] the animation quality on this is insane for an indie project
He read down it twice before deciding that not one of them believed any of it was real.
[ DarkBlade: ] did i miss episode 3, where do i start from
One of them held his attention longer than the rest.
[ LurkerNoMore: ] been watching without posting for ages but its an unreleased series, look at the interface design
'Unreleased series,' he thought, reading it a second time without arriving anywhere useful, 'they think I am a show.'
It made a certain sense once he turned it over, since nobody on Earth had a reason to believe a stream was coming out of another world, so a production was the only shape the thing could take.
[ CringeSlayer91: ] still think its AI but the wolf girl is carrying the show
They would call it a production, or whatever that artificial thing they kept mentioning was, then go back to arguing about release order.
He could work with that, so he went into the settings while walking and found a toggle he had not noticed before.
[ Broadcast Control ]
[ Stream: ON/OFF ]
[ Note: Turning off the stream pauses Soul Energy accumulation. Goddess Fragment Recovery will not progress while broadcast is inactive. ]
He read the note twice, then put the switch to OFF.
The feed froze, the viewer count stopped moving, then the faint awareness at the back of his skull went out the way a door goes quiet after somebody shuts it.
He had not known it was open.
He put the switch back to ON, then the comments resumed as though nothing had interrupted them.
[ CringeSlayer91: ] did the stream just lag
'I can shut it off whenever I want,' he thought, letting the panel drift back to the corner of his vision, 'which means nobody watches me sleep unless I decide to sell tickets.'
[ NewViewer_02: ] did that freeze for everyone or just me, i only got here today
That mattered more to him than the Soul Energy did, at least until somebody explained what Soul Energy actually bought.
[ ShadowMage44: ] server issues probably, this thing is held together with tape
"How do you feel about cities?" he asked over his shoulder, keeping his pace even so she would not have to change hers.
The question landed harder than he intended, because her shoulders came up before her answer did.
"I don't," she said, her eyes staying on the road ahead of him.
"That is not an answer," he said, stepping around a rut without looking down at it, "though I will take it."
"It is an answer," she said, closing half a step before she thought better of it, "you asked how I feel."
"Fair," he said, watching the traffic thicken toward the gate, "we need salt and rope, neither of which grows on a deer."
"They will look at me," she said, her hand going halfway to one ear before she stopped it, "they always look."
"They will," he said, refusing to soften it for her, "the difference is that looking is all a bored man at a gate has time for."
"You do not know that," she said, quieter, though she kept walking.
"No," he said, "so we go in with our hands visible and find out."
The road curved around a hill, then the capital opened up in front of them.
[ DarkBlade: ] city arc lets go
Walls ran left and right past the point where he could follow them, with a gate under the middle wide enough to take a dozen carts abreast.
Merchants, adventurers and ordinary travelers moved through it in a steady line without anybody stopping them.
Guards stood at the entrance in armor, watching the crowd with the kind of attention that only wakes up when something looks wrong.
'Walk in the way everyone else does,' he thought, easing his pace a little, 'hands visible, no mana, nothing worth a second look.'
He glanced at his right wrist, where the Rings would come up if he channeled, then at the ears she could do nothing about.
Travelers on the road had been giving her the same nervous glance for an hour, then finding somewhere else to put their eyes.
[ LurkerNoMore: ] somebody get the wolf girl a hood before the gate, im begging
'Or I could simply not channel anything,' he thought, which settled the question by a wide margin.
He kept walking while the comments rolled on from people who thought they were watching a show.
[ CringeSlayer91: ] if they do the guards stop them at the gate trope im dropping this
He almost smiled at that one, 'let us find out together.'
"Stay on my left," he said, shifting so the cart traffic sat between her and the guard post, "and keep your eyes down without making a performance of it."
"I have done this before," she said, which was the longest thing she had said to him in two days.
"How did that go?" he asked.
"I left," she said, and did not offer the rest of it.
The line of carts slowed to a crawl.
By the time they reached the gate the crowd had thickened to the point where the guards were sorting carts rather than people.
Hajin held his pace and walked straight through with Juna a step off his shoulder.
One guard looked at her ears for a moment, then at him, then waved the next cart through as though neither of them was worth the paperwork.
Nobody asked him for a name.
They were inside before he finished bracing for the part where somebody stopped them.
[ ShadowMage44: ] they just walked in, no checkpoint scene at all
'Huh,' he thought, with the noise of the city arriving from every direction at once, 'the audience was wrong for once.'
[ CringeSlayer91: ] okay fair play
Noise came off the stalls in a solid front, then the smell of frying oil went over the top of it.
[ NewViewer_02: ] so nobody checks papers at the gate? is that normal or did something go wrong
He got six steps in before he noticed that she had stopped walking.
She was standing with her head up and her nose working, which was the first time he had watched her look at something without planning a way out of it.
"Bread," she said, and her ears came forward before she noticed them doing it.
"There is a lot of it," he said, steering her clear of a handcart without quite touching her, "so we will get to that after the guild."
"Why a guild," she asked, without taking her eyes off the stall.
"Because I have cores in this bag and no coin in my pocket," he said, patting it once until it clicked, "and a guild is where those two facts meet."
"That does not sound like bread," she said, dropping back into her three steps with her eyes still on the stall.